Donelle Ruwe,
PhD

Biography

My
research interests include 18th- and 19th-century British literature (my Ph.D.
dissertation at the University of Notre Dame was on British Romanticism), but I
have a special passion for poetry of all kinds as well as the history of
children’s literature. My new book British Children’s Poetry
in the Romantic Era: Verse, Riddle, and Rhyme(Palgrave Macmillan 2014)
explores the first wave of children’s poetry and identifies the qualities and
elements of popular children’s verse from 1780 to today. I’m interested in children’s poetry because I
am a poet myself. My master’s degree from Boise State University was in
creative writing, and I’ve published two national award-winning poetry
chapbooks, Condiments (1996) and Another Message You Miss the Point of (2006).
One of my poems, “The Thousandth Night,” is a retelling of the Scheherezade
story, and it was selected for The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Fourteenth
Annual Collection (2001). You can
read my poetry
in the open-access journal Ninepatch. Recently,
I’ve grown interested in childhood and performance studies, and I’m co-editing
a collection of essays with James Leve called Broadway Babies: Children, Childhood, and Musical Theater for the
publisher Ashgate. In 2005, I edited the essay collection Culturing the Child, 1690-1914, and I continue to publish research
on women writers and British Romanticism. I am a co-founder and current co-president
of a national scholarly organization, the 18th- and 19th-Century British Women
Writers Association, and I work with different universities and graduate
students across the United States in organizing this association’s annual
conference.

I create classes that emphasize
student mastery of literary approaches and scholarly vocabulary, and I like to
create interesting final projects. My
undergraduate classes might require students to recite poetry or craft a
casebook of literary analysis, and since my graduate classes emphasize
professional and marketable skills, students often prepare conference papers or
publishable essays as their final project. Most of my students have given
papers at regional or national scholarly conferences (such as the Rocky
Mountain Modern Language Association Conference), and every year students have
their work accepted for publication. Most recently, Scott Shumaker’s essay on
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and
Cassandra Galentine’s essay on Graham Greene’s The Quiet American have been accepted for publication in The Explicator, and Kathryn Schmitz’s
essay on George MacDonald’s The Princess
and the Goblin has been accepted by North
Wind: a Journal of George MacDonald Studies.